Surfin MIA

Life Beyond Search, Trump's Tab Low

"Type how to fix broken headlight into a search engine, and it returns a list of links to websites and videos that explain the process. Ask an [AI-powered] LLM the same thing and it will just tell you how to do it." This is not the setup for a "how many LLM's does it take to screw in a lightbulb" joke. The world wide web ushered in an era where creators could put stuff on the internet and other people used search engines to find it. All that is changing. "The arrival of generative-AI tools has introduced a voracious new consumer of writing. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases. They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human. These LLMs have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader." Basically, AI is drinking the web's milkshake. How will this new machinery between creator and consumer change things? WWWtf is going to become of posting, searching, and clicking? In The Atlantic (Gift Article), Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier take a crack at predicting how things might change. The conclusions may not all be right, but there's little doubt that in many ways, It’s the End of the Web as We Know It. And I feel fine. (Actually, I'm not sure how I feel and when I asked ChatGPT, it wasn't much help.)

+ "She needed a good metaphor as to what navigating the internet felt like in the early days. 'It was hard. You needed some skill to do it, but it was fun,' Polly said. Her mousepad happened to have a picture of a surfer and said 'information surfer,' a phrase that was already floating around. The words just clicked for her." NPR: Meet the woman who helped libraries across the U.S. 'surf the internet.'

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Meta Morphosis

"After years of pitching its suite of social media apps as the lifeblood of campaigns, Meta is breaking up with politics. The company has decreased the visibility of politics-focused posts and accounts on Facebook and Instagram as well as imposed new rules on political advertisers, kneecapping the targeting system long used by politicians to reach potential voters." In many ways, politicians used Facebook targeting and shady marketing to corrupt our elections. Now that Meta is moving away from political content, how will things change? Bigly. "Comparing March 2020 to March 2024, both the Biden and Trump campaigns saw 60 percent declines in their average engagement per Facebook post ... The 25 most-cited news organizations in the United States lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook and 58 percent of interactions on Instagram between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024." WaPo (Gift Article): As Meta flees politics, campaigns rely on new tricks to reach voters.

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Off the Reservation

"The disappearance of a new police department so soon after the wreck was highly unusual, the kind of story you might never hear twice. But other parts of Braven’s story were deeply familiar: unanswered questions after deaths on the reservation, inadequate law enforcement. Before 2020, the federal government controlled policing in the Crow Nation—providing only a handful of officers for an area two-thirds the size of Connecticut. Crimes went unsolved, grieving relatives complained of faulty investigations, and some victims wouldn’t even call for help, fearing violence by officers." An investigative piece from Center for Investigative Reporting and MoJo: A New Police Force Chased a 17-Year-Old Boy to His Death. Then It Vanished.

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Trump's Tab Low

With David Pecker on the stand in the Trump trial, much of the testimony has related to the National Enquirer and other trashy tabloids. But one man's trash is another man's treasure. And so it was with the weird (and oddly illuminating, or at least illuminating the odd) relationship between Trump and the tabs. WaPo (Gift Article): Trump’s long, strange history with the tabloids. "When Marla Maples was about to give birth to Donald Trump’s fourth child, Tiffany, in 1993, then-New York Daily News gossip columnist Linda Stasi had her editor’s orders: Get in the room to see the baby. Maples objected, but Trump invited Stasi to the hospital, where she walked into the private room after the birth, conducted a quick interview, then asked if her photographer could snap a photo. Maples shooed her out, Stasi said in an interview. Trump soon followed, holding an empty blanket. 'Here, take my picture. Just pretend there’s a baby in here,' Stasi recalled Trump saying. The camera flashed." (Related: Can you name the pithy public intellectual who once wrote, "PT Barnum may have been the greatest sociologist of all time." Hint: It was me, last week.)

+ Before today's testimony, there was a hearing on Trump's (obvious) violation of the gag order. It included this exchange: Judge Merchan: "What is your caselaw that supports your position that your client can repost and that doesn't violate the gag order?" Trump attorney Blanche: "I don't have any cases. It's just common sense." (I must have missed the episode of Law & Order when this legal strategy was deployed.) Judge skewers Trump defense's 'credibility' in gag order hearing ahead of key witness testimony.

+ NYT (Gift Article): The Circus Trump Wanted Outside His Trial Hasn’t Arrived. (At least he's got the nonstop one taking place on cable news.)

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Extra, Extra

Package Deal: "The package, which passed the House on Saturday, includes $60 billion in aid to Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said would give his country 'a chance at victory' against Russia. It includes $26 billion in aid to Israel and humanitarian relief in Gaza, in addition to $8 billion for security in Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific." It also gives "TikTok’s China-based parent company nine months, which the president could extend to a year, to sell the popular social media platform or be banned in the U.S." Senate advances Ukraine aid, Israel funding and TikTok ban.

+ In the Zone: "A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting on a stone bench on campus and speaking with a tall, brawny man named Danny Shaw, who holds a master’s in international affairs from Columbia and now teaches seminars on Israel in the liberated zone. When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. 'It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,' he said. He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested that the 'genocidal goliath' will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II." The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone.'

+ Hamas or Menos: "Israel’s military operations in Gaza have weakened Hamas. Most Hamas battalions have been degraded and are scattered. Thousands of its members have been killed, and at least one senior military leader has been eliminated. Yet Israel has not achieved its primary goals of the war: freeing hostages and fully destroying Hamas." NYT: The Stark Reality of Israel’s Fight in Gaza. "Six months into the conflict, the question of what Israel has achieved — and when and how the fighting could come to an end — is creating ever more intense global strains around a war that has cost Israel support from even close allies."

+ FBIOU: "The Justice Department agreed to pay more than $138 million to victims of disgraced sports physician Larry Nassar and apologized for the FBI's failing to act on warnings about the convicted sex abuser."

+ Is That Everyone? Quartz: UnitedHealth Group says it paid a ransom to protect patient data from a cyberattack. "A preliminary review of targeted data found files that contained protected health information and personally identifiable information, 'which could cover a substantial portion of people in America.'"

+ Have You Tried Unplugging It and Pluggin It Back In? "The 46-year-old Nasa spacecraft is humanity's most distant object. A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this." (Imagine fixing your computer problem from 15 billion miles away.) Voyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space.

+ Just Due It: Last week, people were pretty surprised by the low salary Caitlin Clark will earn in the WNBA ($76,000 as a rookie.). Well, she made up for it this week with an 8 year, $28 million shoe deal with Nike.

+ The Vinyl Countdown: Online, Taylor Swift just smashed Spotify's single day streaming record (beating her own record which previously beat her own record...) In the terrestrial world, she broke the record for weekly vinyl sales (in 3 days).

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Bottom of the News

"New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone was ejected from his team's game against the Oakland Athletics on Monday for doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. This isn't a 'gotcha' scenario or a bait-and-switch. Boone did nothing to get ejected by home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt and was simply standing in the dugout. Unfortunately for him, he was standing directly underneath a mouthy fan who might have sounded an awful lot like Boone."

+ Megan Thee Stallion accused of harassment by cameraman who said he was forced to watch her have sex.